Monday, June 7, 2010

The last week

Stacy has my CODEXA and I'm looking forward to graduation Friday!

: )

Thursday, May 6, 2010

The files are IN the computer!

Dissected my old DELL laptop yesterday in hopes of coming out with a functioning CCFL inverter + ballast (Or at least a better idea of what to order online before buying this).

Found that my laptop had only one tiny CCFL lighting up the whole screen! So damn, the 30 I have are gonna be bright. Also considered: why do I need an inverter? I'd just going to be running this from AC wall socket to DC unnecessary middleman to inverter (which converts back to AC for the bulb). So perhaps I could just stick AC and use a solid state ballast like w/ compact flourescent bulbs, hence the picture. Today at Fremont (after I get outta classes at UW) I plan to try to light up the CCFL I extracted w/o electrocuting myself.



BTW, I know this pic shows nada, but just click on it. I don't have time to find out how to shift the image over from this strip blogger selected. Going to class!

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Thesis Production Schedule

WEEK 3- 4.14
Test new 1/16” router bit on 1/4” and 1/8” acrylic at Fremont.
Decide whether 1/8” or 1/16” bit is a more appropriate scale.
Order CCFL edge lights.

WEEK 4- 4.21
Design scaffolding to secure panels in space.
Purchase, cut plexi sheet.
Continue to work on first 2.5-D model draft in Rhino.

WEEK 5- 4.28
Final decision on display strategy: pedestal vs suspension.
Complete basic/functional scaffolding structure at Fremont.
Finish Rhino draft for midterm review.
Engrave panels on router.

WEEK 6- 5.5
Present draft of multi-panel configuration.
Begin incorporating midterm feedback into next Rhino model.
Purchase 2nd round of plexi.
Possibly alter # of panels, panel dimensions and/or letter x-height.

WEEK 7- 5.12
Test lighting situation in SOA exhibition space to see whether CCFLs attain sufficient text contrast.
If scaffolding is functional, but looks bad, allow time to redesign/re-fabrication.
Continue work on final Rhino model.

WEEK 8- 5.19
Final Rhino model complete.
Engrave last set of panels.
Ensure that panel edge lighting is incorporated into scaffolding in an elegant way.

WEEK 9- Wednesday - 5.26
Present the final work for critique, as it will appear in SOA

Thursday - 5.27
Load installation into gallery space.
Make any necessary positioning adjustments relative to surrounding pieces.
Invite friends and fam…

WEEK 10- Tuesday 6.1
Exhibition opening!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Still Seeking an Effective Medium

Over the last couple weeks, I've tried a number of different materials, hoping to find something that I can build my concept into in a way that I can significantly develop on next quarter. Unfortunately, there have been more dead-ends than progress in this search. Over the last couple weeks I tried a transparent planar array, as indicated in a previous post, and more recently I tried working with wires (with an eye toward eventually implementing via electroluminescent wire to work in a automated temporal aspect).

The topographical cross-sections planar array idea (ala David Spriggs) seems to work much better for solid objects, particularly large blurry ones with little detail. Not so much for typography I discovered. Wires? Low gauge was too fragile on a large scale, higher gauge was rigid but nearly impossible to make nice looking joins with. Giant wire snappers and bruised thumbs are evidence of a lack of precision and delicacy in the product.

Tonight I'm working with some vinyl caps lettering I bought and some 3/32" thin matte black graphic tape. I'll use the transparent acetate sheets I have rather than paper, but I'm not sure yet how I want to layer them. Probably best to just dive in and see if it begins to looks promising or not.

That said, further updates coming soon.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

A transparent planar array

Big thanks out to Nate for an inspiring art ref: the works of David Spriggs. I bought a couple pads of large acetate sheets today to do dimensional experiments with. The next step will be working out a scaffold/framing to space them out.



Will an array of planes provide a reasonable medium to flow between stereoglyphic and an augmented latin alphabet? I'm a little skeptical that the loss of depth resolution will be of an order such that character legibility is acceptable, but I'm nonetheless excited to try it out.

Sprigg's Archaeology of Space (2008), a work of hung sheets (catenary curves presumably), seems to be Sprigg's sole violation of flat planar arrays. Though the flat grid approach seems perhaps most "invisible" or ignorable, adjacent cylinder surfaces (or concentric) may be another workable approach, particularly considering that many of the stereoglyphic letters I designed are constructed of helical skew curves.

A secondary idea about possible variants of this approach include the consideration of A) having the sheet spacing be dynamic via some mechanism, either trivial (multi-sheet edge connection "spine"; allow the viewer/reader to tangibly move the sheets) or complex (automated), and B) variable lighting.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

thanks

Thanks to everybody for the feedback!

Besides thinking of scaffolding ideas for the string script and increasing the alphabetic inventory of the stereoglyphs, I plan to spend time this week experimenting with some 2D pseudoenglish and seeing if any new sorts of ideas for component integration come out of that.

I forget who brought it up, but the idea of each script encoding descriptions of the others was intriguing.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

featural scripts

This hierarchy represents the granularity of morphemic and phonemic symbolism:

pictograph >
logograph >
syllabary >
alphabet >
abugida >
abjad >
featural


Of these, Hangul (Korean) is usually attested as the only featural script (It was a deliberate construction, dating from ca. 1443). Contesting this view is the following article:

Primus, Beatrice. 2004. A featural analysis of the Modern Roman Alphabet. Written Language and Literacy, 7.2, 235–274

It's super interesting and one has to give the professor credit for trying to be systematic in her analysis. So I give it an A for effort, but…it's nonetheless unconvincing and historically naive.

The granularity of a formal (non-representational aka digital decomposable, not analog) script usually correlates to graphmic complexity in that characters that symbolize less granularity tend toward greater visual complexity; an inverse relation.